Self Interest

Joycey

This is an email I wrote to a couple of people randomly a few weeks ago. Still wondering about it. Maybe someone on here can give me their reply to it. Anyway, here ye go:




This is in response to Johny's notion that my every action is made purely out of self interest and that this notion is adequate to explain my actions in the world.

Ive had a question in my mind for months now which has to do with doing violence to nature. Its been one of those questions that you have in mind when your reading stuff which helps you to focus on different responses to what you read. The question is something along these lines: is there something inherently wrong in my cutting down a tree?

What i mean by inherently is something like is there something wrong with my damaging the tree when the possible ramifications to my wellbeing are taken out of the equation. My aim was to find a justification for my not really carefully reasoned intuition that there is some kind of value which resides in the tree which doesnt just rely on my being self interested to prevent me from damaging it.

What motivated me to come to ask the question was, in part, realising that there must have been some kind of fundamental shift in the way that human beings relate to nature which has arisen from or maybe caused our rapid development and which fueled the modernisation which we have seen taking place in the West since the industrial revolution.

We have moved from a more or less sustainable, mutually compatible between ourselves and nature mode of living, to a way of life which is entirely unsustainable at least over the long term and most probably even over the very short term. If you look at the few societies whos modes of living we havent yet destroyed and whos lifestyles could be said to be sustainable over the long term (im thinking of Inuit tribes and the like who have been living in the same very harsh environment for 10,000 or so years), one of the key differences between their relationship to nature and our own is the fact that they very often (if not universally) have invested some notion of the sacred into their surroundings, and as a result place a value in the natural objects which they use for survival which covers more then just what possible use value they have. While this may very well be explained as coming about purely as a way of relating to nature which is self interested, but in the long term rather then the short term, what I am interested in here is the manner in which they have justified this special way of relating which resides in the psyche, or the collective consciousness of the society (through seeing the natural world as sacred) and which we have lost.

So the conclusion that I had kind of come to was something along the lines of us needing to invest once again some notion of the sacred in the natural world in order to prevent its complete destruction at our hands. Not in any kind of BS new-agey way but recognising the value which I think is inherent in the natural world.

However when I was reading something about a week or so ago about the way we use "technology", here understood as something really, really general which can be defined as something like "that which functions as a means to an end", I started to think that maybe what I was doing was simply dressing up what were after all entirely selfish motives in this kind of psuedo-ethical/moral clothing, and that what I should do from now on was simply to recognise and make explicit exactly what my motivations are for wanting the natural world to be preserved. I thought that rather then appealing to something like the sacred when trying to convince someone of the value in nature that I should just appeal instead to these motivations which are present in me and which they presumably share, and convince them like that, "from one self interested being to another" as it were.

All this changed earlier today when I realised that another belief which I have had for ages came to my mind as an answer to this purely self interested way of argueing. This belief has its roots in some strains of Buddhism but has come to me through Nietzsche and Hoffstadter, the guy who wrote that Godel Escher Bach book. The belief is that there is no meaningful distinction between the human and the non-human, the animal and the non-animal and so on. Now while I do obviously recognise that there is something in the category of what we all call human which allows us to distinguish "humans" from say dogs or giraffes, I would argue that this distinction is more along the lines of the kind of distinction we make between different types of tree while the different types are still under the overall category of "tree", as opposed to the way we currently distinguish between trees, humans and animals.

The reason the above thinkers say that it is rediculous to talk about the human and the non-human is (put really crudely) the fact that every living being (and in Nietzsche's and the Buddists case even inanimate objects like rocks and tables and so on) are part of one massive interconnected web of relations, causal and otherwise, and that it is impossible to affect one node in the network without also affecting the entirety of the rest of the web in the process. This is a vastly different notion of causality from the traditionally accepted Western notion of one thing causing another which causes another and so on and which is actually better accounted for by contemporary notions of the nature of causality in physics then is the one still popular in Western culture today.

So if you work from the premiss that there is no distinction between me and the rest of the natural world, then you have a valid arguement for not chopping down the tree. While it is possible to trivially account for the notion that this desire not to cut down the tree is motivated out of self intersest, this account shows itself for exactly what it is: trivial. What I have done is to radically shift idea of me being the self which I called forth to consciousness by my saying the word "I", to what might as well be a scenario where there is no entity which I can call "myself". This completely destroys the notion of me acting out of self interest because where you can say "I stole the chocolate bar because I wanted it and im selfish" and have that statement not be completely rediculous under the previous notion of the self, when you say "I didnt chop down the tree because it is a part of me and im selfish", the idea of selfish loses all meaning.

Hopefully that made sense, it came out completely differently from the way i was picturing it before I wrote the email

Joe1919

Joycey wrote: »

This is in response to Johny's notion that my every action is made purely out of self interest and that this notion is adequate to explain my actions in the world.

Your friend, Johnny seems to be putting forward the thesis of Psychological Egoism, the thesis that 'people only do and can only do, what they want' and that all human action must ultimately be explained in terms of the subjective desire of the person concerned. If we take an example of two statements
1. I want to 'help other people'.
2. I want to 'help myself'.
Both sentences are similar from the subjective point of view i.e. the person wants to act and in acting will do what he/she wants in both cases. However, if we take an objective view, and look at the object of the sentence, we see in the first place the object of the person's want or desire is to 'help other people' whereas in the second place it's to 'help myself.' We see then that when we take an objective viewpoint of Psychological Egoism, it runs into very serious trouble as a thesis as we now distinguish between the subjective 'I want to act' and the objective 'what it is I want to do'. In the first sentence, the person values other people, 'what matters to me' is other people, and I am motivated to help other people and any action taken to help others may be reasonably seen as altruistic and not self interested. In the second case the person values themselves, 'what matters to me' is myself, and I am motivated to help myself and any action taken to help myself can be seen as an egotistical action of self interest.

To say that desire= will (spring or motivation for action) is probably too simple a theory. There is the notion of desire-less action. There are other motivations attributed for action e.g. habit, instinct, duty, belief as well as conscious and unconscious (hidden) desires.

Joycey

Joe1919 wrote: »

Your friend, Johnny seems to be putting forward the thesis of Psychological Egoism, the thesis that 'people only do and can only do, what they want' and that all human action must ultimately be explained in terms of the subjective desire of the person concerned. If we take an example of two statements

Right, thats all well and good given you accept as a presupposition that there is such a thing as my "subjective desire". If I disbelieve the existence of any such a thing as a self which may be acting in such a way as to benefit "itself" then psychological egoism is entirely irrelivant, this "ego" is nothing more then an illusion.

This whole strain of modern Western though, from discourse about fundamental "rights" accorded to this self, rational choice theory, Enlightenment individualism in general, are all based on the Greek division of the "soul" or self or metaphysical thinking entity or whatever you want to call it from the body, the material, the world. I entirely reject such a dichotomy.

"I" am nothing more then a collection of feelings, thoughts, unique ways of looking at the world, interests, capacities, drives and the like, which are glued together, or rather united, by sharing the same perspective. It is this nexus of all these different things, where they meet, from which the illusion of an "I" comes. To the extent that some other nexus of "human" attributes such as those I mentioned above (some other person in everyday terms) shares some of my ways of looking at the world, my thought patterns, my interests, from one of us influencing the other, then I am that person.

Joe1919

Joycey wrote: »

Enlightenment individualism in general, are all based on the Greek division of the "soul" or self or metaphysical thinking entity or whatever you want to call it from the body, the material, the world. I entirely reject such a dichotomy.

I am not advocating dualism in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, we can conceptualise processes as different from the material hardware that these processes run on. (Like the software/hardware computer distinction).
Our subjectivity or our consciousness can be seen as a process or function of the body or mind whereas there is a tendency to see our limbs or body objectivily or as almost external.

Joycey

Joe1919 wrote: »

I am not advocating dualism in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, we can conceptualise processes as different from the material hardware that these processes run on. (Like the software/hardware computer distinction).
Our subjectivity or our consciousness can be seen as a process or function of the body or mind whereas there is a tendency to see our limbs or body objectivily or as almost external.

I know you didnt mean to imply that this ego is the same as a soul, but I would argue that the notion has arisen from refinements of this first move away from conceptualising human beings as entirely physical entities.

Im not sure that I want to claim that we are entirely physical entities either though. Where does that leave my assertion that to the extent that someone shares my special way of looking at the world that they are me? In what sense can you say that my thoughts on whether or not Barrack Obama is serious about climate change are entirely physical?

I dont really know the answer to these things. Obviously these things emerge from the level of complexity necessary in matter to attain a level of self conciousness. I dont believe in any kind of metaphysical plane of existence in which my soul exists or from where thoughts are implanted into my "mind". However it seems reductive to me to claim that my feelings about Barrack Obama or my dislike of red Bounty bars are simply equivalent to the neurons which it was necessary to fire in order to bring about those thoughts.

Back to your statement "there is a tendency to see our limbs or body objectivily or as almost external". I have to disagree with you here. I think it was Levinas (maybe Merleau Ponty) who wrote about the "embodiment" of the soul. Our body is exactly that nexus of perspective which I talked about in my first response, it is where these thoughts and feelings and capacities and viewpoints converge originally and from which they are shared if such sharing takes place. Think about some loved one of yours, can you conceptualise them as distinct from their body? Levinas derived his entire system of ethics from the feeling which is inescapable and provoked when we see suffering in the face of another (im probably mutilating his theory), not with thoughts about these abstract, inalieble rights which are accorded to this non-existent ego or soul or whatever.

Just because its easier to observe my body doesnt mean its all I am or that I am not it, two frequent mistakes IMO in philosophy of mind.

Joe1919

My own view is that dualism is heavily embedded in our language and how we think. When I say "I have a pain in my head", I am talking of the 'I' or intellect in a subjective manner whereas I am talking objectively about my head. Its just the way we use language. We treat our conscious 'I' as something distinct and different from our material 'head'. Nevertheless, we can observe that if we damage our brain materially, we also damage our intellect and memory and can loose our consciousness and so, at least from the scientific point of view, there is a material basis to consciousness and a poor case for dualism.

Another point is the human imagination and its ability to transcend itself in time and space. We can project ourself into the future (with our imagination) and worry about our future well-being. Yet the future itself has no real existence. We can also project ourselves into other people and with this empathy we try to imagine what its like for other people to view us.In this way we can view ourselves as objects and indeed we can even hate ourselves. It is though by some (e.g Hegel ) that this is where our self consciousnesses comes from. We are most self conscious in the presence of others and we see ourselves as reflections in other people.

Indeed, it could be argued that we are the only ( or at least the most) self conscious creatures. Perhaps this is the 'truth' that took place in that great story of the Garden of Eden. At some point, we moved from been conscious creatures to self conscious creatures and with this self consciousnesses came guilt about ourselves. Humans only became truly human when the acquired the ability to project themselves beyond their own body (in space and time) with their imagination and with this imagination came fear and guilt and the ability to lie and cheat as well as the ability to empatise and create.
Part of this imagination and creativity we used to create language and meanings and stories and Gods who favoured some men more than others and gave these men the divine right to rule........